


Canticle

by YouTheWrite



Series: Drake & Josh, not Drake & Josh [1]
Category: The Jack Bull (1999), The Timber (2015)
Genre: Crossover, Drake & Josh meta, Francis of Assisi, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Old West, Original Male Character - Freeform, Period-Typical Racism, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Freeform, Spot The Reference, State vs. Feds, horse vernacular, no I will not apologise, paratext, pointlessly well-researched
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:11:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18874801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouTheWrite/pseuds/YouTheWrite
Summary: Dick Cusack hmu, I made your movie better.It just hit me a couple of weeks ago that both Drake & Josh had each done a seperate Western movie set around the same time and that their characters therein were around the same age, so now this exists. Disclaimer: I don't own Drake Bell or Josh Peck or any of their characters, either of the movies ficc'd herein, or anything else except Jody Redding who is an OC (I needed Cage to have a brother, but the movie does not make it clear if he has them and if so how many or what they're called). Samuel is not given a second-name at all in canon, and while I could have given him one of my own I just got lazy and left it a mystery.I'm not a Christian, but Francis of Assisi was a fellow animist and hell of a lyricist besides so he's ok by me.





	Canticle

**Author's Note:**

> Dick Cusack hmu, I made your movie better.
> 
> It just hit me a couple of weeks ago that both Drake & Josh had each done a seperate Western movie set around the same time and that their characters therein were around the same age, so now this exists. Disclaimer: I don't own Drake Bell or Josh Peck or any of their characters, either of the movies ficc'd herein, or anything else except Jody Redding who is an OC (I needed Cage to have a brother, but the movie does not make it clear if he has them and if so how many or what they're called). Samuel is not given a second-name at all in canon, and while I could have given him one of my own I just got lazy and left it a mystery.
> 
> I'm not a Christian, but Francis of Assisi was a fellow animist and hell of a lyricist besides so he's ok by me.

February 1900. Lincoln County, WY.

Cage Redding turns his shoulder to the chill seeping insidious under the panes cracked by fists. As he inches away from the cold he gets the dangerous notion to latch and tug on Samuel’s fingers, thick as deer lips, to trap their closeness between palms as one might catch moths chasing lamplight. Their heat mingles near as can be in the confines of their cramped accommodations. Cage revels in Samuel’s resting prick snug in the channel of his spine and the stiff black hairs on Samuel’s forelegs that tick at the backs of his flanks, unclad. It’s barely credible that they’ve traded thirty words apiece since meeting and already they’re divested of their clothes, and rolling each other in the way of two mated dogs.

Samuel pants a grass-laced stench of gusty breath right in Cage’s ear at the change in position, as did the Kiger bangtail Cage once fell for - and near broke his neck falling from. The sigh is a warning of force from Samuel if he’s disturbed unduly again. Cage stops shifting.

Settling, Cage takes note of an unexpected rasp that is matted dry on the coverlet under his fingertips; it would seem Samuel has left smatters of his blood on the beaver pelts that touch where he’s gotten cut and Cage couldn’t quite cauterise the lacerations clean as he can with a horse. With one good apple-peeler and one fire between them there’s little better else can be done. The half-burnt slices of skin that lay open raw just hours earlier don’t seem to cheat the bigger man of his sleep; even abed he fitfully grips and squeezes Cage’s half-starved body like a white-head sinking talons down to get his hold on the bark of a Cottonwood tree, the kind from which - at his father’s insistence - a younger Cage had seen heavy white & red blossoms drop in the form of men lynched for thieving cattle.

At unnerving ease with the present situation Cage isn’t much inclined to deny this whaler, this buster, this gadabout come from the cold North whatever he may ask for next. Samuel hasn’t asked him for anything more than wound-tending and a place to lay his head but Cage suspects (and Sam Hill take him, hopes) that sinful intentions may yet seize his temporary bedfellow. 

_Most High, all powerful, good Lord. Yours are the praises, the glory, the honour, and all blessing. To You alone, Most High, do they belong, and no man is worthy to mention Your name._

Cage starts when Samuel, half-woken, touches his tailbone with one of those hands. Having never met a sourdough Cage isn’t sure how to best interpret the intimations he’s getting. He only supposes those copper-headed fingers rippling over his flesh to be proof enough that following the whims of base unthinkable lust is, like as not, the Prospecting way. Perfidy if Cage can’t still smell animal urgency on them, doom of desire impending and the hay & dung & horse’s breath of the departed day.

Alpine Fall was the place of their inaugural encounter; the auction is nowadays the only place Cage meets anybody new, and for the potential sales it’s worth the journey out to Lincoln County whether he speaks to another soul or not. He doesn’t talk too much to anything walking on two legs, these days.  
Samuel at the first sight had his arms full of the struggling foal making a break from the Redding Boys’ pens. Cage hadn’t known what to say by way of greeting or of thanks to the affable dark stranger, who let the still-kicking snuffy gelding - a renegade six-shooter if Cage had ever known one - down at his feet and asked where in these parts a fellow might acquire himself a young bay stallion. Cage told the man he was grieved to say he knew of no such horse at this auction. Worse still Cage had pinked as Samuel’s assessing clear-water eyes stroked over him, rhythmic as Cage would take his bristle-brush to shine the horses’ coats; and the man had added insult to injury with his rejoinder, “Oh, but I must dispute that ain’t the truth - as evidenced before me.”

The second meeting of the two men saw Samuel stagger into Cage behind the courthouse. He was trailing blood from slashes that had rent his coat and shirts beneath asunder. In the failing daylight Cage had ushered him to his room at the tavern, and with the help and paying-off of the keeper’s sister-in-law had seared and stitched the infirm and put him abed. It was a hatchet job at which any sawbones would blanch. The dark man needed to stay warm, the woman had told Cage. 

That was dusk. Now at candlelight the auction is long out and the streets have hushed but for the saloons, and a wakeful Samuel is paying no heed to propriety feeling out the corners of Cage‘s indented hips from behind with hard grabs beneath the skins blanketing them. Cage won't interrupt but is impelled to make token protest. He may not have a great soul worth more than a nickel to the Lord of Creation, but he knows his Mama would want him to comport himself as if that weren’t the case. He hears himself whimper, light and sombre like air trailing through a bone-orchard, “You ought not."  
“And whyn’t? I don‘t see a Sheriff nor an emissary of the Almighty hereabouts, Angel.”  
“You’re hurt awful, still."  
“Then show an ailing man mercy, and take his mind off the pain."  
Cage shies. He thinks of the ghost of his Pa seeing his bare skin sizzling with welts, the curved brand of a man’s mouth. He thinks of Billy’s spirit looking on sad and sick and white-eyed. “I...I don’t know nothin’ about California way. That’s just how it works here in Wyoming. T’ain’t right an’....it’ll get back to somebody.”  
Right in his ear Samuel laughs at him. Cage hears it as one part of a chorus; playing over the sound of nearby carousing sots and the far-off shudder of the galloping trains that skid to a halt on dirt & gravel tracks demarking the edge of town. He even thinks he hears water somewhere close by, sparking up drops as it clatters over glittering white stones.  
Samuel chuckles and kisses down the tendons in Cage's neck for a good minute before he musters a response. “Listen here. Even a saddle-bum such as myself knows this here’s only been a bona-fide State 10 years, darlin’. What’s more, I don’t much care for lawmen legislating what are my personal affairs, those very same lawmen this evening spending your State-tax dollars on Celestial girls of the line.”

Samuel sounds like Myrl in his fervid avowals. Cage knows then that he’s found himself astride a high-binder and whatever his own will he can’t any way stop the other man overpowering his. 

_Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness. Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in Heaven you formed them, clear and precious and beautiful._

Samuel, in barely the time it takes to skin a hide, has Cage gulping and jerking with his manipulations; the iron fingers Cage had taken captive now take possession of him with nothing but brute force and cow-grease from a porcelain dish on the bedside table. Cage’s insides are afire. His muscles move of their own accord. His bone-marrow quickens with rude lightning, a crackling charge. 

Under a hot sun or in a tense negotiation it is a given that Cage bakes and burnishes the trademark dappled russet of the Redding Boys, the colour of the leather on an August apple. At his highest excitement he does just the same. Samuel mines Cage’s body and all Cage can do is pull breath upon breath inward until he can whinny out a blaspheme, and shoot his back with enough power to unseat himself from Samuel’s prick and backward onto the counterpane. Essence varnishes his legs and torso, mixing with the butter on Samuel’s hands and the alchemical combination of both their sweat. Cage would think it later like suckling the blood off the blade of a saddle-horn bone-handle knife.

Samuel’s answering grin is silent and speaks of the Unholy himself, dazzling and lunatic, the Evening Star glimpsed as a fractured disc reflected in a full pail of water. The man looks delighted as if he’d come across a bonanza.  
He drizzles touches and busses down Cage’s heaving belly which is turning pinto with the exertion. Cage feels reverent words sticking against his body more than he hears them. “God Almighty. Just look at you.”  
Cage tries to return the compliment and finds he cannot speak for unexpected afterclaps rocking through his every limb, gentleness of which all those sermons he has heard his whole life long never made mention. He pants, all-overish with the creeping blurts of sensation that follow after a lascivious touch. He ain’t at all used to it. It’s the first time he’s ever been abed with another person in sinfulness.

Only this thought rouses Cage out of his trance, that from this moment he’s condemned to be hell-fired; and, if what the preacher said at graveside was true, then the martyr Myrl Redding who is now stood sentinel on high over the herds of Rawlins will know what wrong his youngest son has done this night. Cage wonders just when it was that his desire grew past his guilt.

_Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind and through the air, cloudy and serene; and every kind of weather through which You give sustenance to Your creatures. Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste. Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you light the night and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong. Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth, who sustains us and governs us and who produces varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs._

**

As Samuel digs out his flask from some secret pocket in his shuck-off breeches, the broader man tells Cage in a voice that stirs with smoke, Buffalo grass in July fires and crosswinds, “I ain’t much for getting sweet on anyone ‘sides my wife, but I’ll say gladly you’re the finest specimen I ever mauled, Red.”  
Cage doesn’t think he can colour much more, and watches his newfound lover tip what must be three slugs of red disturbance down his gullet as if it were sweet mild water from a font. 

There‘s several pertinent and damning questions the horse-trader could ask. “You’re wed?”  
“That’s so.”  
“There ain’t a ring on your person I can see.“  
“Had to trade it for the coin just to make it down this far. Atwixt you an’ me? I ain‘t hurtin‘ for gold, but it ain‘t wise to advertise the fact.“  
Cage imagines Samuel‘s wife as fair, trim and long-browed with Palomino hide and hair wild like a broomie. “T‘ain‘t biblical. Your little lady-”  
”What I just did to you, that biblical?” Cage matches the bottomless stare he gets, and the effort stoppers all the air left in him. He feels like a broken-wind colt. “And you took no part, I suppose? Way you’d tell it, I just plum held you down and let you have it without a provocation," 

Cage tugs on his own ear, shamefaced, and instead of his recent lover looks at the worn boards that he can espy through his toes dangling off the side of the cot. He doesn’t fight with men. He can’t raise voice or hand to anything that ain’t a horse or a stray dog. Every morning he awakes to fresh food and water he thanks the Lord for his bullish brothers, whom without he’d be living on dust and bones by now; hand to mouth like his Ma had feared. But hadn’t they always said in songs & prayers that the meek inherit the Earth?

Samuel screws the cap back atop his flask haphazard, without offering Cage a drop. “You can spare your tubthumping, boy. She don’t know nothing, I’m above snakes. You should warn a feller he’s bedding down with an addle-pot.” At odds with his harsh snipe Samuel only reaches for Cage’s hips to turn him back onto the blankets and lay a hold on his ankles. The bigger man peers downward, at the horse-trader who blinks under his chestnut forelock at the scrutiny. “I take it you ain’t.”  
“Ain’t what?”  
“Married.”  
“No, sir.”  
“You’re of an age to take you a wife, make yourself respectable,” Samuel teethes at the join of Cage’s hip to leg. “What’s the trouble? Got a reputation at the Cathouses, or is it the Angelicas just don’t cotton to you?”  
Cage hasn’t an idea what women in general make of him, ladies or whores. “They like me just fine. It’s just. Well, there’s no bit wants to compete with a mule.”  
At that Samuel hoots and quakes, with such mirth that he topples across Cage and lists over the coverlid. “You--you go a-callin’ in oxbows, or some such? I think I see why you ain’t hitched.” 

Cage frowns and hisses through his teeth, making to leave the bed. Samuel snatches him back by the crook of his elbow. “Aw, you ain’t givin‘ me the mitten already?"  
“I’ve a mind to.” Cage bristles then smiles insouciant though he feels nothing less than pudding-footed in comparison to the shadowed out-of-towner. “You’re fortunate to be so handsome.”  
“God’s truth. An’ it’s doubly so fortunate I’m here to beautify this establishment what with you being ugly as a mud-fence and sappy besides.”  
“Horse-feathers! You take that back, Mister! ” Cage aims his heel at Samuel’s stomach and lands a light hit. Samuel catches him by the shin once more, and chirks in an uncanny imitation of a horse-rustler. 

The laughter falls and sinks into space between the two young men. Samuel’s black brows draw together and he kneads Cage by his soles like a barefoot broodmare for a moment before lifting off the bed and standing upright. He tips his head toward the glow of the broken window, entincelled with dead insects and gummed-shut. “It pains me to say so but, it‘s near daybreak. We ought to get gaited if we’re to skin out without suspicion.”  
Cage eyeballs him. He hasn‘t considered how to conceal their flout from the tavern-keeper or the few nosey townsfolk sure to be abroad at this hour. “Sure enough. You got a pony posted somewhere in town?”  
Samuel looks at him crossways. “You know I don’t. I told you before, I came here in search of one.”  
Cage remembers. It doesn’t ring any more true in the light of a new day. 

Samuel bends to gather his shirts and breeches and boots, while Cage rises to stand equal with him though trembling nude like Eve in the garden. He feels his urge to speak a truth rise on the waters of his suspicion, and replies, “young bucks ain’t easy ridin’ even after they’re broke." Cage pretends not to notice as Samuel leers at him in a lewd once-over. “You’d have asked after a different beast if you was for real play. You can’t ride a shank’s mare over more than fifty miles, and you need a hard horse to make it across state-lines without any bother.”  
“Horseman to the manner born.” Samuel says, with overmuch affection given their short acquaintance.  
”Then why come out so far?” The dawning sun in the pane hesitates, dims to half-light. Samuel’s boot-heels catch on a nail sticking up from a board as the man now fully dressed swaggers forward by the hips slow and easy. “What’re you huntin’?” Samuel looms, nudges his nose against the underside of Cage‘s jaw. “Why’d you get set upon?” Samuel's tongue lathes his Adam's apple and his fingers rub at his spine and buttocks.  
Cage thinks Samuel hasn’t heard his quiet final question as he says nothing, and instead snatches the top skin from the latty in which to swathe Cage. After swaddling his quarry, Samuel melts their lips and bodies together. Cage tastes something akin to syrup of sap from a pine, a stray drop of fine-grade lamp-oil and hearth-ashes from a warm grate. Cage lets Samuel soothe him with licks. They share a slow exhalation. “Best you don’t know."  


Cage forgoes any further objection. He thinks again of Myrl watching him in a brown study, stern as ever he was. 

_Praised be You, my Lord, through those who give pardon for Your love, and bear infirmity and tribulation. Blessed are those who endure in peace for by You, Most High, they shall be crowned. Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm._

A crow snarls at a buzzard, a ways off. It hurts Cage’s nethers to stay on his feet so he sways and rests against upright Samuel. He can imagine how he looks, and feels a sudden kinship with that Kiger he loved and broke hard with starvation the last summer. He keeps his face close against Samuel’s and whispers through a gossamer kiss, “how're we gonna make it out of here?”

Samuel breaks into a another smile, glorious, sun-filled. 

He holds Cage by the jaw. His fingers clamp. He kicks Cage’s legs from under him and pins him to the floor. He forces Cage’s mouth open. He pushes a phial against the back of Cage’s throat. Alcoholic. Mickey Finn. Cage’s skin cools and his heart slows to a canter. Limbs tremor. The voices outside smash through the cracks in the window. The known world dissolves. For a moment Cage Redding is taken to some other time, where a God older and greater than his own spurs a winged stallion wrought of clouds pulling the chariot of the day into night. 

**

Cage’s eldest brother Jody is pacing around the string, all of which lift and grind their hooves as they breathe hay-dust and spittle into the moist air. He‘s more spooked than the horses and than Cage has ever seen him. “Before we leave, I allot upon helping the posse take these fellers to task. And afore I do I want you tell me what it is they said and done to you that left you in such a state.”  
Cage catches him by the thin shoulders mid-turn, only letting go with a misted smile. “Come on, now. That’s a bluff. You see I ain’t much hurt.” 

He makes to check his saddlebags and mount up, but Jody’s gimlet eye halts his industry. ”So you ain‘t encountered any trouble since we rode in, and to pass the time you flogged yourself unconscious on a hog-ranch floor?” Cage pulls his lips inward and hunches. Jody spits, “bullshit. You’re half-lame; look as though you caught the damn yellows, Cage. Then there’s one of our horses missing and here instead one that don’t belong to us," Jody grabs and tugs at the hair of a nearby mule, buckskin and bowlegged, “in case you ain’t noticed. We don’t raise lunkheads nor scrubs like this’n. And now I hear tell there’s a man got murdered out in the open yesterday noon. Somethin' ain't right."  
Cage shrugs and turns to check on his span - two black mares he calls Sady & Ladybug, the former for her ability to dance in her loping gait and the latter for the luck she has brought the Redding Boys in trade since her arrival. “Like as not it’s Sagebrush men done such. It’s one horse gone, and while I don’t much like the fact? They’s dangerous and wild men out in that brush. So I say, we ought to take our medicine and keep to ourselves.”  
“‘sakes alive, you ain’t using your intuition. Cowboys ain’t given to such barbarism, and they don’t have cause to steal ponies.”  
“Arapaho, could be.”  
“Wouldn’t dare. They’re near-settled here.”  
"Then it’s Government men, ain’t it? Federals don’t take to statists, you ain’t gotta tell me.”  
“This ain’t straight-down-the-line political agitation neither, boy.” Cage looks over. Jody’s face is contorted. “The stiff they found’s a bastard of the Governor by a whore. Not yet thirty, a popular cuss. Gambling man. They stuck him with a little Injun scalping knife and left him laying out by the hitching posts with a postal note pinned to him reads ‘Care of Mr. DeForest Richards; Douglas, Wyoming'," Cage swallows and forces himself to look headlong at his last remaining kin. He feels lightheaded and confused. He can still smell the fumes of the chloral from several hours prior. His brother still rails, “-now, that sound like the dirty deeds of a federalist to you?" Cage tries to block from his memory the emergent sound of flesh cooking under the flat of a black blade, and of blood simmering, and of a man crying out hoarse as a bear in a trap.

Jody is rooting through his own bags, doubtless looking for his Colt. “We can’t just skip town now. They know our name, about Myrl."  
”We got people to cover for us. They knew where we was last night.”  
”Well, I surely do not recall your presence at my craps table, last night.” Cage winces as he steps around the horses and his muscles complain querulous. He can‘t remember the events of the early morning to the present time beyond the scream of the innkeeper‘s sister, and the feel of his brother’s rough-clothed arms. “What if there’s a bounty on their heads? What if this is what Pa always said-”  
“-ain’t our concern. You see where righteousness and law-way got him." Jody gapes. Cage steadies his breathing. His every part throbs sore but he holds himself in place, sturdy. He ignores the will to run with his feet flying over earth at the speed of his string unloosed. “And ‘sides, there’s no sense in a manhunt. He--they’ll be among the willows by now.”

Ladybug begins to stamp. A cold wind steals over the dirt. “What’d you say?" Jody sounds just like their father. “Just then, you said ‘he’. Just one fellow get you?” Cage looks upward at the sun muscling through the morning’s haze. “Cage, you seen this man that done murder? If you’re sayin’ what I imagine-”  
Cage‘s own anger startles him. “I ain’t said nothin’!”  
Jody steps back a few paces, spreads his hands empty of a pistol. "You still drunk? Or just off your damn mental reservation?"  
"Sober as a judge, alright?"  
"Then why you runnin' scared? You know the Code, 'a horse thief pays with his life' and 'a coward ain't tolerated in any outfit'."  
Cage wants to cry, and he hasn’t indulged in tears since his Pa died. “Jody. We ain't cowboys. I ain’t trying to hornswoggle and I ain’t trying to fight, and I ask no adds. I just--wanna forget this whole sorry situation and go back home right quick.”  


Jody looks embarrassed. He casts an eye about to make certain no-one has heard his brother's outburst. He hushes his voice. “If this is what I said about Daddy-”  
“No." Cage walks over to Sady and grips her caveson, resting his head against hers. "He made his jack, and now his name’s much set by." He speaks quietly to the mare but loud enough for Jody to hear. “Please. Let’s just cut stick.”  
“Alright." Jody isn’t looking at him. He’s mounted and trotting away before Cage can thank him. Jody yells, “we bound for Rawlins. Maybe make the show in Jackson on the way if we ride out now.” It’s an order couched as a suggestion, one Cage gratefully takes.  
Cage’s lead-horse brisks up when his rider comes around to his left flank and swings up onto the rig. “Reckon that’ll do right fine."

As they reach the outskirts and follow the trails to Salt River, Jody calls back to his brother, “ _‘We are rough men and used to rough ways!’_ ” It’s an old reliable joke, but they’re no James-Younger boys and Cage doesn’t laugh at the line anymore. 

There’s a weather-breeder overhead and the cold is unforgiving. 

They don’t make Jackson and they don’t stop in Cheyenne, but they sell Ladybug at a good lay in Laramie.


End file.
